The Providence Journal - Hospitals Upgrading to Hotel Class

The Providence Journal

For weeks Joyce Butler, an organizational consultant at the Lifespan Training Institute, a professional development center run by the hospital system, shuffled them in.

Cooks, maintenance men, parking attendants, janitors and receptionists, the nuts-and-bolts staff of the Miriam Hospital , were going to learn a different approach to patient care.

“Who is your customer?” Butler asked one of her groups of 23 students. “What do you see in terms of their expectations?”

The replies were as different as the cross section of hospital employees. But, with each group of the nearly 400 people Butler has brought in for the 2½-hour sessions, the end message was clear:

“People don't have to go to a hotel — they choose to go,” Butler explains. “People have to go to a hospital. But they can pick the hospital they choose to go to.”

The Miriam Hospital says the courses it is giving its operational staff are based on The Ritz-Carlton hotel chain's model for customer service. The hope, Butler said, is that improved customer service among hospital employees will mean better experiences for patients, their friends and their families. As Americans begin to spend greater and greater resources on medical services, they are beginning to expect more from all different kinds of hospital staff. Little differences in how patients are treated can mean a big difference in how a medical experience is perceived.

“We have always focused on customer care and customer service because we think that our patients have a choice and that they can go anywhere they want to go,” Sandra Cheng, vice president of support services at Miriam Hospital , said. “We want patients, when they come into the hospital, to feel good about where they are.”

Cheng said she had been thinking about giving a course in customer service to hospital staff for years. Basing it on the training given to hotel staff seemed a fairly obvious next step. All the similarities were there, she explained.

Nadia Gorman is an aide at Miriam Hospital , which has a new program to improve employees' customer-service skills.

PROJO JOBS TRAINING / Steve Szydlowski

“When you truly think about it, The Miriam is a hotel; a hotel with medical components,” she said. “People stay here and they expect the best quality of service, not just medically, but from the service staff. They expect the best service from beginning to end: When they park their car, in the lobby and at the information desk. They want their food to be good and their rooms to be spotless.”

Butler , who designed the course, has had a wide background in training people to provide better customer service. Emphasis on the customer isn't given the attention it deserves by most businesses, she said.

“A lot of companies, I think, don't reward the right things,” Butler said. “When you think of great customer service only a few companies come to mind. I think by focusing on this aspect of training we give the hospital a competitive edge.”

During her training seminars, Butler asks hospital employees to anticipate what patients and their families want. It all goes back to her original question about customer anticipation. The idea, Butler said, is that if you think about what customers want ahead of time you will be better prepared to exceed their expectations.

At Specialty Scripts, an online pharmacy based in Fall River , Mass. , the employees also try to anticipate what a customer wants ahead of time.

The company sells medicines for HIV, cancer and other illnesses that require complex therapies.

“We're a 24-hour-per-day pharmacy,” Valerie Sullivan, vice president of business development for the company, said. “We send prescriptions out by FedEx so customers don't have to go pick them up. And we're always available on the phone to walk people through how to use their medicine.”

Specialty Scripts, Sullivan said, invests heavily in customer service. The employees work hard not to keep their customers on hold and to pick up their telephone calls immediately. The company also tries to make sure its call center employees know exactly how to talk to different kinds of customers experiencing different kinds of problems, Sullivan said. To do that, the company hired Dianne Durkin, founder of Loyalty Factor , a company that specializes in teaching customer-service employees how to read verbal cues over the phone.

“Basically what we do is help people understand the things people are saying by the way they are saying it,” Durkin said. “We teach people how to really listen, to understand the concern and the emotion being experienced by the customer, so they can respond effectively.”

The company's 30 employees have all been through the program, Sullivan said, and what they have learned has not only improved customer satisfaction, but also the contentment of the employees. Knowing what the company expects of them makes a big difference in how employees do their jobs, she said.

“We want to give our employees the tools to alleviate their frustration so they can alleviate a customer's frustration,” Sullivan said. “Happy employees deliver better customer service.”

Does investing in customer service lead to better business results for health-care firms?

It doesn't hurt, said Tara Schumacher, a spokeswoman for Cardinal Healthcare, which recently bought Specialty Scripts.

Cardinal, based in Dublin , Ohio , is one of the nation's biggest medical technology firms. It purchased Specialty Scripts, Schumacher said, because of its superior customer service.

“It definitely had to do with the comprehensive service they provide,” she said. “Our purchase of Specialty Scripts helps us get into a market we don't have a strong presence in, and we wanted to purchase a firm that was a leader providing for the specialty needs of clients.”